Friday, July 21, 2017
Brexiteering in the Sahara
ETHAN ARKWRIGHT - SUB-SAHARA – 2016
What a book! The story is crazy and utopian but that’s
beside the point I want to make. You will love that utopian battle for some
extraterrestrial source of energy that has such an immense life span that we
cannot even predict its end. Beautiful. And it comes from under the sand of the
Sahara, like oil and natural gas, from a city that was still there in the 1950s
built around a metal pyramid that contained this supreme source of energy
praised, cherished and adored like a god by the people who accepted to die in
the room where it was exposed due to some ultrafine invisible deadly poisonous sand
or dust. The role of the Nazi is purely secondary and some kind of romantic
fallback to the standard evil symbol.
But the book deals with geopolitical global considerations that
are surprising in many ways.
A British private though connected to some state services
group of adventurers financing some archaeological venture in the south of the
Sahara, in Niger precisely, get informed that a hurricane has completely
uncovered an ancient city with a metal pyramid in the middle and that they are
proceeding to it and the obviously added containers around the midriff of this
pyramid. The main archaeologist plays it double and informs a competing but
absolutely violent and uncontrollable group to sell her discovery to the better
bidder.
The British team then encounters various groups and have to
defeat them in some twelve hours or so. First the Chinese attack even before
the British team reaches its destination. They are fast and radical but they
are defeated of course; Isn’t it natural? Good riddance. Apart from the fact it
is not exactly what the Chinese are doing, military intervention and strikes to
destroy any competitor, it is funny how nasty this quick episode is and there
is no explanation of how they managed to be informed about the move of this
private secret British team: there is always a fink or a fissure in all secure
situation. Sad, as Trump would tweet.
Then they are confronted to the challenging violent brutal
competitor, Titan. But the British team is so naïve that they do not even see
that their intervention as Red Cross doctors is a loincloth on the aggressive
intent of these Titan assassins. In the meantime they have to defeat a detached
unit from the Nigerian army. Easy again, since the Nigerian army is both
underequipped and not very brave.
The Titan team, which is only a vanguard, creates havoc but
the British team is more creative and they of course manage to take over the whole
situation and control the next stage. The only thing they get out of this is
that Titan had been informed by one of the members of the initial
archaeological team, and this understanding is going to be essential since they
have to make sure the betrayal will not succeed and that the source of energy
they will recuperate will remain in their own hands. It is in fact the leader
of the initial archaeological team who is the double agent, hence the finkish traitor
to the people who paid for her initial venture. She is a stoolie canary in
other words.
Then they enter the pyramid and have to go through all kinds
of traps to recuperate the source of energy that contains an element that is
unknown and hence is extraterrestrial, if that is possible, but let’s suspend
our disbelief. While the leader of the British team is liquidating the remnants
of the initial Titan team, the team inside the pyramid is successful and manages
to find their way out in tunnels, after they have been rejoined with their boss
who can take over the last leg of the operation.
When they come out they find the Nigerian army, with the French
Foreign Legion as their main supporters, in fact their real bosses, and behind
a second Titan team that has come to recuperate the source of energy. These
Titan people cause a stir that eliminates half the Nigerian army and the French
Foreign Legion, as well as half of their own members.
Of course the British team who had managed to securely hide
the source of energy in the underground escaping tunnels, fools everyone and
distributes the fake source of energy in a certain number of lead containers whose
content is verified to be highly radioactive, let’s be NBC for a minute, and the
party poopers all go away with their prizes. Unluckily for them these lead
containers contain a tracker and as soon as the various parties are gone drones
take off from the top of the pyramid, or so, and destroy all the outgoing convoys,
except one on the Titan side because they had two vehicles but only one lead
container. So the British team picks the real source of energy from where it
was hidden and they chase the Titan team, save the only survivor and use their
plane to go back to Europe with the promise of paying the mercenaries and
releasing them as soon as they arrive in their first stop in Libya, with no
strings attached.
Mind you the Americans are only mentioned because they are
the worst of them all since they will probably arrive on the site but when
everything has been cleaned up and after the battle. The Americans are not
ready to become great again, if they ever do.
Conclusion. The Chinese go fast and are first but they are
defeated in two seconds. Then the locals, the Nigerians, are ineffective and
not very courageous. Then an alternative competing hostile British team using
mercenaries is really subtler than the central British private team and fools
them at least two or three times but are defeated in the end and their boss is deep-fried
in phosphorous. A hot burning hot ending for a man used to massive killings. Then
the Nigerian army and their “allies” the French Foreign Legion are just
ineffective and easy to fool both by Titan who is following just behind them
and by the British team who is just setting a plate of goodies in front of the
greedy Frenchies. Should I say it is a plate of French fries with frog legs? I
guess I could. And the Americans are the final and totally ineffective dummies
who come last for sure and only get the bones of the turkey that everyone else
ate, stuffing, dressing and all side dishes, before the Americans were able to
even approach the site. Thanksgiving is no longer what it used to be.
Thanks goodness! Only the British people are on top,
provided they are on the side of the official state system, but governed by
private enterprise imagination and creativity. In other words, only the British
can dominate the world if they are deeply and resolutely Brexiteers. And
Brexiteers they are, ending their adventure in some kind of all male gentry
club on Pall Mall in London drinking some good spirit and smoking some Havana
cigars. Maybe that aspect is a little bit excessive and nostalgic, nostalgic of
the good old Empire time when there was only one other empire, the French
colonial empire. It did not last very long from WW1 to WW2 and we know the catastrophic
result of this rivalry. The British will always dream of the world as an
eternal and repetitive Falklands campaign.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:53 AM 
